Glenn Greenwald's The Intercept asked the government for comment on a story. The feds handed the scoop to the AP.

last updated 8 January 2015

Over at The Intercept, Ryan Devereaux and Jeremy Scahill have a fascinating story about the government's rapidly growing terrorist watchlist. There are 680,000 people on this "Terrorist Screening Database," and over 40 percent of them have "no recognized terrorist affiliation." Both this list and the related "no fly list" have been expanding rapidly in recent years. Here's a graphic explaining the watchlist:

Just a few minutes before this piece ran, however, the Associated Press threw up a quick piece on exactly the same subject. According to the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim, this was a deliberate leak from the government:

The government, it turned out, had "spoiled the scoop," an informally forbidden practice in the world of journalism. To spoil a scoop, the subject of a story, when asked for comment, tips off a different, typically friendlier outlet in the hopes of diminishing the attention the first outlet would have gotten. Tuesday's AP story was much friendlier to the government's position, explaining the surge of people added to the watch list on a foiled terror plot. [Huffington Post]

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Ryan Cooper is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. His work has appeared in the Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and the Washington Post.